


Lord of the Flights

by An_Escaped_Rabbit



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-11
Updated: 2015-06-11
Packaged: 2018-04-03 23:13:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4118221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/An_Escaped_Rabbit/pseuds/An_Escaped_Rabbit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Has Voldemort finally gone truly mad? Severus Snape certainly thinks so, and with good reason. After all, flying without a broom? That's impossible! A twoshot inspired by The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but no knowledge of Hitchhiker's is necessary.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In Which Things Happen

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author. Any grammatical butchery, however, is Voldemort's fault and should be taken up with the Death Eaters' Bureau of Complaints. If you're feeling at all suicidal, that is. Otherwise you can just mention it in a review. Oh, and I should mention that I paraphrased from Hitchhiker's a bit.
> 
> Thanks to the inestimable stars90 for beta-ing.
> 
> Cross-posted from FFN.

The dark lord was about to die. Not in battle, fiercely fighting to the end, nor in triumph, dying as the world burned. No. It was as unimpressive as you could get. No bards or poets would rise to fame singing of  _his_  end. It was not villainous; it was not glorious. It wasn't even like anyone had tried to kill him. It was purely accidental.

The greatest dark lord of all time had just fallen out of a window.

"I'm going to die!" he shrieked, arms flailing desperately. I'm going to die, he thought frantically, and I haven't even killed Dumbledore yet! I'm going to die! I'm going to die! I'm going to die! I want my mummy!

Well, no, his thoughts continued pensively, I don't. Filthy half-squib, why would I want her? Ugh, of course I don't want my mu- Oh Merlin, why the hell am I thinking about Merope Gaunt, I'm going to die, I'm going to die, I'm going to die, where's my wand oh shit it's in the tower I just fell out of oh no oh no oh no I'm going to die-

Voldemort's thoughts continued in this run-on vein for a while before something occurred that scarred him for life, or at least for the next few days. Through a window, Voldemort glimpsed a showering Peter Pettigrew.

Any thought of gravity and his impending doom flew out of his head and he began to hover in shock. The blubber, his mind wailed. The rolls of fat! The glistening soapsuds decorating the traumatized rubber duck! The off-tune caterwauling! It made for a-a-a  _something_  sight, thought Voldemort wildly, adjectives fleeing his mind in terror for their lives.

In an effort to get away from the horrible sight, Voldemort swooped upwards. Soon he could no longer see...  _it_... and breathed a sigh of deep relief.

At which point he noticed that he was no longer falling and gravity promptly caught up with him. Fortunately, though, his hand had unconsciously reached for a grip on the tower and gravity's sinister scheme was spoiled. With great effort, Voldemort hauled himself over the windowsill he was clasping for dear life and collapsed on the floor to ponder what in the name of fluffy unicorn tails had just happened.

* * *

"What?" Severus Snape asked blankly, certain he had misheard.

"You just have to throw yourself at the ground and miss," Voldemort repeated helpfully.

There was a silence as Snape furiously tried to decide if switching from the side of a clearly insane dark lord to the side of a barmy old curmudgeon might be a good idea. All his senses screamed yes, highlighting the word and flashing it in glittery neon colors before his eyes.

No, he replied firmly. This sounds so crazy that it  _must_  contain sense, he told himself, and unsuccessfully tried to believe it.

"Throw yourself at the ground," he enunciated slowly, "and...  _miss._ "

"Oh, yes, Severus," the Dark Lord told him cheerfully. "I'm glad you seem to have grasped the concept."

After another pause, during which Snape conducted another furious mental battle, he asked, "And how exactly do you do that, my lord?"

"Well, you have to do it accidentally," Voldemort said, and Snape resisted an urge to bash his head against the wall. "See, you have to completely forget about gravity. You have to be suddenly distracted to the extent that you're not thinking about falling, or the ground, or the pain you're going to experience really, really soon."

"Suddenly distracted?" Snape asked, interested despite himself. "By what?"

"By, oh, I don't know, catching sight of a beautiful flower, or a spell going off nearby, or seeing Wormtail in the shower..." Voldemort's voice trailed off as he tried, for the forty-seven thousand and ninth time, to bleach the image out of his mind. Snape just blinked and decided not to think about that last phrase.

When it became apparent that Voldemort was not about to continue, Snape cleared his throat.

"So... how does the sudden distraction help?"

"Yes, distraction!" Voldemort leaped back to the conversation like a drowning man grabbing a shark to avoid the water. "In your distraction, you will miss the ground and remain hovering in the air majestically. You must concentrate now and ignore your weight; just let yourself drift higher and higher. If anyone says 'Dear Merlin, you can't possibly be flying!', kill them immediately because if you believe them they will turn out to be right."

Snape nodded mentally. Most conversations with Voldemort eventually turned around to murder.

Aloud, he said, "And then what do you do?"

"Oh, for Merlin's sake," said Voldemort, "try it yourself," and he swiftly pushed Snape out the window.

Snape let out a frightened yelp and then, not feeling any better, let out a frightened shriek. Above him, Voldemort posed theatrically on the windowsill before diving off.

"Dear Merlin," cried Voldemort happily. "Look at this peculiarly shaped crack in the wall!" He stopped falling and examined the crack before quickly losing interest.

Snape was having no such luck. "Ahhh!" he shrieked again, still getting steadily closer and closer to the ground, or, as he thought of it in his melodrama, to his doom.

Voldemort sat in midair, chin perched on hands, eagerly waiting to see Snape either be surprised or be a splatter of grease on the pavement. Either way, he was sure it would be entertaining.

He didn't have very long to wait. Snape inhaled deeply and tried to push thoughts of gravity to the back of his mind. It didn't work, but he felt slightly calmer. That is, until the thoughts came rushing back into the forefront of his mind and he was as panicked as before. He desperately tried not to look at the ground, finally turning his head upwards and staring at the sky in fear. That didn't work either. Snape was ready to give u-

Suddenly, a giant white creature swooped overhead! Its wings extended outwards stiffly and- were those  _windows_  on its side?

Snape gaped at the monstrosity, which swept through the sky and quickly disappeared over the horizon.

"What the devil was  _that?_ ", Snape asked Voldemort in horror.

Voldemort shrugged. "I've no idea," he said, "probably some muggle thing."

"Okay," said Snape, "so-" He stopped, suddenly aware that Voldemort had not moved from his position far above, yet Snape was now level with him.

Snape's mouth fell open with shock. He was...flying!

_No_ , the rational part of his mind insisted,  _this is impossible! This can't be happeni-_ As he felt himself begin to fall, Snape hastily amended that thought to,  _T_ _his is perfectly realistic and of course I am flying, it certainly fits with all known laws of physics._ The falling stopped, much to Snape's relief.

Voldemort sighed disappointedly.

* * *

"This isn't possible," Nott whimpered. "This isn't possible!"

Voldemort smirked at Snape. Vaguely wanting to see some casual bloodshed, he had been going through the ranks of Death Eaters and teaching them to fly, knowing that eventually one would refuse to stop believing in gravity. As the official First Person Whom The Dark Lord Taught To Fly, Snape had claimed the privilege of watching.

Voldemort and Snape waited for a moment. There was a scream as Nott crashed, and Voldemort craned his head to look at the blood.


	2. In Which Things Are Observed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Or, how inspiration was gained.

The night sky glittered as a young muggle man wandered idly through the field. It was a beautiful night in a beautiful place; he had been wise to choose this idyllic area as a holiday spot, he reflected.

He stared at the grass swaying in the breeze for a while before he looked up and caught sight of what appeared to be the ruins of an old castle. He took a few steps closer to it and then suddenly got an odd sense that it looked far too dangerous to go any nearer. He was about to turn around when he saw a flash of movement. A man had just fallen out of a hole in the side of the ruins! He stood there, frozen in surprise, and found that he somehow could not move. He knew with a dreadful certainty that he was about to witness a death, but he stood, paralyzed, stuck to the spot. He watched with a horrified fear as the man got closer and closer to the ground, and he braced himself for what he knew was coming.

Suddenly, as if by magic, the falling man started hovering in midair! The muggle watched in shock as he swooped through the air, moving higher and higher.

When he was level with the hole- which now appeared to the astonished muggle to be a window, set in the tower of a castle that suddenly looked much safer and not nearly as dilapidated- the man called out, "See? It's easy! Just try it!"

A figure inside the tower crouched on the windowsill nervously. The muggle could make out no details of its appearance save for the long sheet of pale blonde hair framing its face, so he assumed it was a woman.

The woman said something, but the muggle could not hear what.

"Remember, just throw yourself at the ground and miss!" called the man.

The muggle watched in stupefied astonishment as the woman jumped. She fell. She continued falling. She fell some more.

The muggle watched silently and willed the woman to fly. It did not appear to work. The woman was getting awfully close to the ground...

Finally, when it appeared all hope was gone, the woman stopped falling. She hovered in the air for a moment and then rose hesitantly to meet the man. The muggle watched them fly away together bemusedly. When he could o longer see them, he flopped down in the grass, suddenly tired. He lay down, stared at the stars, and pondered what he'd seen.  _Just throw yourself at the ground and miss,_ the man had said. A young Douglas Adams turned this over in his head several times, wondering what it could possibly mean.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you caught the minor inconsistency between this and the previous chapter, kudos to you. If you didn't, I'm not going to point it out.
> 
> By the way, the castle isn't Hogwarts. Some FFN reviewers thought it was.


End file.
